SWTOR: State Of The Game Update

SWTOR’s Executive Producer, Jeff Hickman, has posted a ‘State Of The Game’ update on the official website to cover off a range of issues. You can read the whole shebang here, but the synopsis is:

1. End-game content: more stuff on the way, with Rise of The Hutt Cartel a significant component but with new content released around it.

We have a plan mapped out for the upcoming year that will keep the elder game fresh and interesting for players of all types. Overall, we’re aiming to introduce a more diverse array of activities – more stuff to do with your Companion, more challenges to tackle with groups, and more reasons for guilds to recruit. We’ll also be improving our itemization, introducing new incentives to revisit existing areas, and a lot of other exciting things that will be revealed as we move through the upcoming year.

2. PvP: Ilum is to be fixed/changed, with no new world PvP outside of Ilum coming this year.

As for pure Open World PvP…well, that’s a more difficult proposition. We are dedicated to providing excellent PvP experiences to our players, but we intend to focus our energy on PvP Seasons and new Warzones. We will be experimenting with a different approach to Open World PvP, something that encourages organic PvP in contested areas in a new and interesting way, but do not look for massive new Open World PvP this year

3. Character transfers: ability to transfer your characters to the PTS is coming soon, live character transfers across the board coming this year.

You should expect to see this come within the first part of this year. It will provide free character copies to PTS at any time (with possible restrictions dependent upon our testing needs at any given time). This will also lay the foundation for our new live character transfer system that will be coming later this year.

4. Same gender romance: it’s turned out harder to implement than expected but Rise Of The Hutt Cartel / Makeb will contain some same gender options.

Unfortunately, this will take a lot more work than we realized at the time and it (like some other pieces of content we talked about earlier in the year) has been delayed as we focused on the changes required to take the game Free-to-Play. As we have said in the past, allowing same gender romance is something we are very supportive of.

Secondly, I want to reveal today that we are adding SGR with some NPCs on Makeb and do intend on pursuing more SGR options in the future. More details to come!

What’s your take on Jeff Hickman’s update? A solid roadmap for the next few months or a more fragile wish list?